As we will discuss in class, ensuring that students, from K-12 to college, are science-literate is now recognized as one of the more important missions of our schools and universities. Given all the issues we’ve discussed this semester, a list that includes organic foods, GMOs, food safety, obesity, climate change, and allergens, one can argue that food science literacy is particularly relevant. Obviously, COVID-19 and vaccines were among the most important issues of recent years, and science distrust and misunderstanding have also been discussed.
Indeed, so important is this topic that the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences now regularly convene workshops to address Food Literacy. Here are the proceedings (down-loadable for free) from 2021.
There were plenty of opinions on how to promote food literacy, from childhood education to training physicians. Perhaps one of the main challenges was stated by one author as “how to deliver knowledge to people whose lives are too busy for them to take on any more chores”.
Credible food-in-the-news stories are published every day on-line and in print newspapers and magazines. Yet the number of people who actually read those articles is probably a small percent of those that read or “hear about” what some “influencer”on social media has to say. This is the challenge in a nutshell.